Lies!

Saturday Night Live was never funny. You were just sleep-stoned or otherwise addled enough to laugh at anything said or done with a knowing smirk.

Oh, and "The Moderate Voice" has become horrifically orwellian and echo-chamber nuts. Avoid at all costs.

The irony here, if I understand the thesis, is that the robust, pugnacious, resilient pioneer types whom Robert Heinlein idealized, are precisely the opposite of the actual subjects of a hypothetical Ira Howard Foundation project. Namely, that the heredity which is selected for in marginal and harsh environments - most of human existence prior to the late nineteenth century, in the formulation of the linked essay - is for fast-burners, short-lived members of the species who are capable of surviving deprivation, disease, stress and predation through their youth & long enough to reproduce. Supposedly the removal of such environmental stressors due to the onset of late modernity is allowing slow-burners to reproduce more effectively, thus increasing the average lifespan of the species.

Given that late modernity also presents an increasingly low birth rate to parallel the increase in average lifespan, I rather suspect that this theory is bollocks. I just was amused by the thought of Heinlein rolling over in his grave at the thought of a real world equivalent of his Lazarus Long being an uncoordinated, impractical, hollow-chested, introverted, under-sexed Last Man.

h/t

Big to-do with people stuck in Europe because of Eyjafjallajokull (everybody's joking that the volcano's name looks like the result of letting your cat crawl off your lap onto the keyboard, btw). I was talking to my company's president last night, and he mentioned in passing that our CEO, who hasn't been in the office recently, is stuck in France right now. I joked about him getting a berth on a ship back to the States, and the president rather seriously noted that everything's bought up for months in advance along those terms.

I speculated that there's somebody converting freighters for the passenger trade as we spoke.

Terrible news - John "Sco" Scofield, an old Otakon hand who was con chair in 1998, has died of cancer. I hadn't seen him in years, and had no idea he was sick.

Sco worked for the NSA. He was an old-fashioned tech guy, but he worked in the guest relations department at the con. He was the first chair of the convention who wasn't part of the old "PSSFS-Alumni" clique. He lived in Maryland somewhere between Baltimore and DC. We had a couple of planning meetings at his condo; I remember he had a small pachinko machine in his living room.

The last time I saw him was at a "ComCon" winter gathering back when I had come back to the convention to work as a nameless goon in the registration department. That must have been February 2003. This is kind of a shock, he was far too young for this.

Sadly, the America of new frontiers and bright mornings was long ago. Today we live in Hospice America, where caretakers with first-class temperaments and sharply creased trousers make us comfortable in the face of inevitable decline… and forward the bills for our end-of-greatness care to our children, who will go bankrupt paying them.

Ouch. He gets sharper-tongued as he builds momentum through the following paragraphs. I've been reading Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. It will soon be important to know and advocate those stratagems which have proven themselves over the long run for the weakened and enfeebled hegemon which has lost her strategic depth and has little muscle left to confront threats directly. We operate according to the maxims of Western modernity, of vigour and direct confrontation - the time may soon be coming where our bankruptcy will require we learn the vicious arts of diversion, conspiracy, discord, and careful, parsimonious bribery.

h/t

Thanks to everybody who came on up to Bellefonte for our big alumni gaming get-together & skeet shoot this weekend. It was great having everybody over, I look forward to hosting one of these little get-togethers again.

I'll try to get the kitchen a little better-stocked next time, I promise! ^_^

The new company blog.

There was a little Tea Party protest in front of the Bellefonte courthouse, about two dozen folks clustered in and around the Civil War monument around the feet of Statuary Andrew Curtin. I bought a little Gadsden flag from their donation-table, but I didn't hang around. Today's a work day, right?

There was a two or three-man electric geezer-rock band playing a set over by the courthouse steps. I assumed they were with the protesters. No sign of griefers, but I didn't really bother reading all the signs. If there were any troublemakers, in a "crowd" of twenty-some people, I'd have expected to have heard or seen something. There were at least three people with cameras - possibly more, I passed a woman carrying a tripod the other way when I went over to the square from having dropped some mail off at the post office.

Hahahahahahahahahaha-[wheeeeeezewheeeeze]-hahahaheeeehehahahehehehah[dies]

Snerk.

This whole "crashing the Tea Party" business is a little goofy. The one party I actually went to - in State College on April 15th of last year - had a guy in a tea bag costume whom I was pretty sure was making fun of the gathering. Nobody paid him any mind, because he was a fifty-year-old hippie wearing a man-sized tea bag. "Griefing" is at the same time older than folks give it credit for, and less serious.

Don't get excited until the guys in the black ski masks show up. And it shouldn't matter if the guy holding a blatantly racist sign is a griefer or for real - you still should ask him to go home & leave his racial hang-ups in the closet with the white hood, regardless of whether his klan drag is meant ironically or in dead earnest.

(I should mention that I haven't run into or even seen pictures of these legendary, mythical anti-Obama racist protesters in the actual flesh. It can be hard to tell the mobys from the actual David Dukes online.)

Thought for the day:

Rock smashes scissors
Scissors cut paper
Paper wraps rock
Rock crushes lizard
Lizard poisons Spock
Spock disassembles scissors
Scissors decapitates lizard
Lizard eats paper
Paper refutes Spock.
Spock vaporizes rock.
-the Big Bang Theory's game expansion for "Rock Scissors Paper"

On a walk through town this morning, I discovered two things. Firstly, there's a new used-book store opening in the Crider Exchange, the signs are very cryptic as to when they're actually opening the doors, but it looks like they're still organizing.

Secondly, there was a parade scheduled through town for a welcoming-home ceremony for the State College company of the 112th Infantry. So I got a little flag & watched. For some reason, they put the company's flatbed at the front of the parade, later on I realized that it was because they were going to meet up with their families at the armory and watch the rest of the parade when it wound its way out to the edge of town, but while I was standing down at the courthouse, all I could think was "why isn't the band in front?"

They really need to stop throwing candy to the children at these things. I kind of think it breeds the wrong attitude in the young'ins. Also, it seems kind of hazardous, what with all the scurrying around in the presence of moving vehicles. And the lost bits of candy in the gutters will attract vermin long after the parade is over.

But yeah, welcome home, gentlemen. I understand there's a party for the families out at the armory until 6:30 PM today. Have fun!

You know it's a strange night when you dream about real estate & you aren't even in the market. It eventually evolved into a nightmarish bar-crawl through a peculiar imaginary version of Chicago where they'd built grain-elevators-cum-seawalls across the slums of the South Side to protect against - what, tsunamis from Lake Michigan?

I suppose it was set off by noticing the flocks of for-sale signs springing up all over Bellefonte. Prices look to be going down, too. There's a foreclosure sale over in the neighborhood I used to rent in. There are *two* houses around the place on S. Spring that I almost bought until I came to my senses & realized it was a structural disaster; one of them just got their listing price cut by 5k. I'm queasily wondering how much value my place has lost since my closing...

Yeah, everybody's having fun with Rep. Johnson's befuddled brain-fart about Guam "tipping over", but folks ought to remember that this guy was the lesser of two evils for conservatives a while back when he primaried Cynthia McKinney. I'm not kidding, he got support from Red State. He's *still* the sanest congressman to grace that district this decade.

YEAOWCH!

Stupid &#$@!ing knee joint... about fifteen feet from the employee's entrance at work, my right knee dislocated, bad on a slick bit of heavy frost. Had to punch the kneecap back into place. Boy, that hurt. They saw me inside, and helped me to my desk. This hasn't happened in at least five years, and thank god for that. Hurts like a sunofagun. I'm going to have to find where I left that stupid ace bandage...

There's nothing quite so surreal as sitting in a bar, listening to a Glenn Beck-esque harangue from a Republican, female pagan social worker about the evils of the 2010 census form, and thinking that you aren't nearly as conservative as you thought you were. Strange world.

I got yelled at by a co-worker for having already mailed in my census form. I pointed out that there was very little chance of my household acquiring any additional inhabitants prior to April 1st, and he said that wasn't the point.

And yes, I checked the "Race: Other" & wrote-in "American". If Pakistani counts as a race, so does "American". Heck, an "Asian" is an inhabitant of a continent - any racial definition which includes Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, mainland Hindus, Afghans, Han Chinese, and Iranians can only be as valid as a similarly genetically-blind "American" agglomeration.

I finished watching Pumpkin Scissors, which was a bargain-bin raid trophy from last month. I had only watched the first episode back when it first aired, and didn't think much of it, having been on some sort of authenticity kick or something like that. It's a show about a military civil affairs unit (more or less, they call it "war relief", but you get the general idea) in a world which recently wrapped up a World War I-type conflict, and is suffering from the mother of all demobilization recessions.

The two protagonists are Randel Oland, a towering, badly damaged stormtrooper with a severe case of institutionalization, and Lieutenant Alice Malvin, an aristocratic enthusiast who just barely missed the war - her academy class graduated on the day of the armistice. She basically picks up Oland from the side of the road - he's a shellshocked headcase, perpetually poleaxed & in search of someone to tell him how to live without the structure that the war gave him. He makes Alice his sin-eater - someone who promises to tell him how to live as something other than the dehumanized, monstrous killer that their empire's deeply amoral military made out of him. In turn, he goes on beserker rampages of shocking viciousness when she lets his leash loose. This isn't one of those bloodless fighting shows where the protagonists never kill anyone - his on-screen body count is in the dozens, although it trails off after the initial ten episodes' bursts of bloodshed.

I didn't pay the show more attention than I did initially because it comes with a somewhat silly gimmick. Oland was part of a bio-soldier engineering project to produce specialized killing machines - chemical troops, flamethrowers, anti-tank troopers, ninja - via obscure, madscience surgery and chemical manipulation. Oland was an "anti-tank trooper", turned into a thing that could charge a tank & basically tear it apart single-handed, with nothing more than a pair of the Jaws of Life and a preposterous fifty-calibre "Doorknocker" anti-armor pistol. The show looks like it's going to be "tank of the week"-style weekly rampages, but they drop that after about four iterations. After that, it turns into something a lot more interesting.

That's because Alice takes over the show, and Oland becomes a supporting character. He's a monster looking for salvation, but Alice is an actual Hero. She's a straightforward, bloody-minded, ruthless, hard-charging lieutenant, who never calls Oland on his monstrous beserker outbursts, or accepts the limitations and compromises demanded by the corruption of the military around her, and the economic failures of society in general. There's one arc which basically consists of Alice's merry band of "war relief" specialists repeatedly arresting the same group of drug dealers (who are victimizing the population of war refugees they're trying to get resettled), only to have them be bailed out the moment they get to headquarters. Eventually, she tries to save the dealers from their own boss, who grew understandably wroth with the hassle and expense of dozens of bailouts, and just ordered his Dragon to incinerate the whole lot of them, soldiers dealers and all.

Anyways, the TV series ends with a long six-episode arc about a gang of petty-marxist workers who were incited by a shadowy conspiracy to descend upon a nobles' ball, pitchforks and axes in hand, to kill a corrupt economic minister & slaughter the feckless, partying nobles while they were in the neighborhood. Alice, attending the ball with her fiance & sisters, spends the next six episodes attempting to defuse the situation in her own way: via the narrative of righteous, judicious violence. It's a fascinating dance of manipulation and pugnacity, as she retrieves her blade, challenges the corrupt, cowering minister to a duel, and proceeds to filibuster the potential massacre into an arrest of all guilty parties.

Eventually.

In the interim, there's a virtuoso display of the practical uses of violence, and an explicit demonstration of how weapons can be tools for changing the minds of your opponent. There's a soliloquy by a minor villain on why bladed weapons (or in his case, a flail) are superior to guns for the purpose of cowing civilians and repelling mobs, talking about the psychological impact of a pointed edge in your face. There's Alice's violent symposium of the purposes of nobility, for the edification of both the angry mob & the rather useless, cowering crowd of effete minor nobility, most of whom are at least a head taller than her. There's how her own troops, having rode to the rescue, eventually yell her down & threaten to put her under arrest for going on a rampage while off duty & without official sanction. And then there's the central set-piece duel, wherein Alice eventually demonstrates how to fight someone with a big, heavy machete when you've got a glorified long dagger. The whole arc is about the primacy of narrative over physical violence. Alice's object is to impose her narrative upon a much larger group of much larger men, and she does it with her principles, a great-lunged bellowing Voice of Authority, and concentrated, charismatic violence. It's *great*.

It's also about an episode and a half too long - like a Dragonball Z fight that seems to take two months to wrap up. But I was willing to give the show the time to make its point.

In short, Pumpkin Scissors is one of those military shows that gets all the details wrong - the unit's moe little secretary is a sergeant major, and thus effectively outranks every other member of that "little festival unit", including the commanding captain - while still getting the spirit of the thing exactly right.

Prof Mankiw claims, piously:

Sin taxes try to correct for behavior that some social planner deems as not sufficiently virtuous

in the process of trying to make a distinction between "sin taxes" and "pigovian taxes". Apparently, pigovian taxes try to correct for behavior which some economist finds to be an offense against economic morality. Oh, I'm sorry, he says "negative externalities", as if that means something other than an economist's notion of virtue.

I'll just note that no legislature has ever enacted a law in favor of the actions of gravity, but there are many which have tried to repeal the laws of thermodynamics.

There was a guy at the McCain campaign office in State College who was stuck doing gun-rights calls, since he apparently sort-of matched the demographic. He kept grousing that he wasn't actually a hard-edge NRA type, and was more of a fisherman than a hunter. But he never expressed any worry that Obama would want to keep him from fly-fishing. I suppose you never do see 'em coming, do you? They're gonna crack down on recreational fishing now, are they?

Eh, I'm not really a fisher, either. And the only thing I shoot with my shotgun is skeet. So I don't really have any skin in this particular fooferaw. But really, are they trying to totally alienate everyone who isn't an agoraphobic concrete canyon-dweller? What's next, extortionate new ecologically-justified green fees for golfers?

h/t

Yeah, if Palin actually does a reality show which doesn't feature ex-effects guys rigging a pair of tractor-trailers to sandwich a subcompact or fishing boats in the Bering Straits, then I'm done with her. I can't stand "reality show" piffle.

h/t